


Less Without You

by JudetheInvincible



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Classified Information, Death, Gen, Government Conspiracy, Government Cover-Ups, Grief/Mourning, Grieving, I Don't Really Have a Plot, Implied/Referenced Character Death, It's Just Going to Happen, Lance is Missing Presumed Dead, Missing in Action, Sadness, assumed death, how do I title
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-10-12 18:47:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10497282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JudetheInvincible/pseuds/JudetheInvincible
Summary: After Lance disappears, Rosa McClain is left to fend for her family against reporters, school bullies, and depression.  The Garrison tells her nothing, but a little bit of digging reveals lots of things that her middle son's flight school would rather remain in the dark.I wrote this because A) I like seeing people grieve and exploring how something can change people's lives and B) because I am so stoked when I read about Very Intelligent Background Characters.  We don't get to see much about the parents, so I thought I'd indulge myself.





	1. The Work Begins

**Author's Note:**

> I THINK I POSTED THIS BY ACCIDENT WHEN I WAS TRYING TO SAVE IT SO NO THERE ISN'T REALLY A STORY YET BUT I'M WORKING ON THAT
> 
> Edit: Okay, it's finished now, I'm sorry if you had to read it when it was three sentences long, I haven't been on AO3 long enough to know wtf is going on. Thanks for sticking with me.

The house had never been quiet before. There were five kids-- no, four-- that had had enough life in them for centuries. It wasn't that the life was gone. Not completely. But there was less of it. Objectively speaking, the McClain household had less life in it since Lance had left.

At first, it seemed that he was just gone. To the Garrison, to the stars, to adventure. He wasn't there, but he still called, still sent them pictures and emails.

Rosa McClain loved her boy, and his adventures were told to every neighbor, pictures of him in uniform shown to every stranger in a supermarket.  Her boy was a pilot, a fighter pilot.  He was so close to going into space.  He was closing in on his dream.

Then there had been news of an unidentified spacecraft in the upper atmosphere, and one of the Garrison officers had come around the next day.

"There was an accident," they had said. "We were unable to retrieve the body."

That's all it had been called from then on.

The Accident.

At least that's what Rosa had called it in front of the little ones.  She didn't want Manny and Bella to know that many swears yet.  To the older ones, to Sara and Hector, it was known as "the fucking mierda the government told us" or just "that bullshit" if Thomas, Rosa's husband, was asked.  Occasionally, when the pain of the lies and the cover-ups and the absence were too much to bear, she plumbed the depths of her vocabulary, but that was something not to be done around the children.

She dug through her most recent pictures of Lance for one appropriate for a small memorial and found one with him smiling in his uniform.  It was taken the day before he left for the Galaxy Garrison, and she could still picture him whining about all the photos.  She knew that he really loved having all of them, but he wanted to still be a kid before he left, rather than an astronaut.  His grin was genuine and broad and his uniform was freshly cleaned.  She smiled and put it aside.

After a bit more rummaging through boxes, she found another one that suited her purposes.  It was a candid shot of him saluting her mockingly while running by.  It had been taken with her sister-in-law's expensive camera, so it was surprisingly in focus.  Rosa looked back and forth between the two.  One was her boy as a soldier ready for his next adventure, the other a young man living life as it came to him.  How did she want to remember Lance?

A soldier, a cadet loyal to the government that had cost him his life in an undisclosed accident, or a teen who wanted, more than anything, to have fun?

She framed the picture of him being a dork ( _her_ dork) the next day and stuck the photo of him in uniform at the bottom of the box.

They had seen the news coverage of it later.  The pictures of Lance with those two other boys and Rosa wondered about their families.  How were they holding up? What was happening to them?

She didn't want to look for them.  She might've worried for them, but the McClain's had their own worries.  They had to fend off reporters on a near daily basis, and then weekly, and then monthly.  Eventually, after almost six months, the men with their notepads and phones and video cameras had stopped coming.  At last, Rosa could stop fearing that her children were being harassed by strange people on their way home from school.

In school, however, they had other problems.  Children came up to her kids and brought up Lance.  There was a week in which Manny had been sent home every afternoon without fail because he started crying.  His teacher suggested grief counseling, so now Manny didn't have lunch with his friends.  Sara got into a fight with a boy in the year above her and was suspended for a week.  She maintained that she would have done it again, and Rosa had to come into the high school to keep her from being expelled.  Bella stopped talking altogether.  She was one of the milder children, but now she never spoke unless it was in response to a question.  Hector, the oldest, had taken on the role of keeping track of them in the morning and on the way home from school, and Rosa felt herself letting her children down.

 _I'm their mother.  I should be doing that.  Hector shouldn't have to do my job for me._  But another part of her sighed in relief every time she heard him get up in the early morning to make them lunches.  She made sure to get them their favorite movies from the movie rental on Fridays and to make sure that there was always food in the fridge and toothpaste in the bathroom.

Hector would be going to college in a few years, and Rosa needed to take advantage of his presence while he was there.  She applied for a job at the library to keep busy, and she got it within record time.  She was certain that this was out of pity, but she was thankful even so.

Now that both she and Thomas were working, Hector was saddled with more responsibility.  Rosa sometimes was shocked out of an activity at work with a wave of guilt that had her pinching her skin and biting her tongue.  But the shift she had was mostly uneventful and she made use of the computer to look for more about what had happened.

She was shocked by the results.

A little over two years ago, a Garrison space mission had gone sideways.  She remembered the news from that and found herself biting her hand again.

It was listed as a pilot error.

Sixteen months later, a meteor had plummeted to the surface of Earth and had been intercepted by the Garrison.  There were theories and rants written by foaming-at-the-mouths idiots, but nothing concrete.  Nothing factual.  Nothing that said anything more about the meteor or explained the timing between the meteor and the disappearance of her son.

She lingered on the news reports of a warship in the sky and the transcripts of a press conference in which the Garrison and firmly refuted them.

Two completely contradictory articles.  One from a respected and credible branch of the military.  Another from a clickbait site.

But even if it was clickbait, there were a  _lot_ of photos.  Handheld camera pictures, professional pictures, cameraphone pictures, even a photo from a star-gazing organization.  It must have taken some serious dedication to photoshop  _all_ of them.

She clicked through the star-gazing website in a desperate attempt to find the original photo, but all that was left was a message that read: "this image has been removed for undisclosable reasons.  Sorry!" Rosa scrolled farther down with alarming speed, and almost missed the link.  The link that saved her from complete despair.

A link to the blog of one Colleen Holt, the wife of Samuel Holt and the mother of two children, including Matthew.  The scientists on the Kerberos Mission.  Rosa checked her watch nervously, knowing that her shift was over soon.

2:57 p.m.  Andrea was running late then.  Her shift began at three, but she was supposed to be at the library at least five minutes early and was often there for an extra fifteen.

Rosa emailed herself the link and closed down.  She was careful enough to clear the web history before she left.

When she got home, she set herself to scrounging up a snack for the kids still with her.  She had to keep them as a priority.  They were a certainty and Lance was a variable.  She grabbed all the fruit in the crisper and decided to make a fruit salad, mostly because she knew it was something that everyone would eat.  Admittedly, the fruit selection didn't go far beyond a few apples (all green), three bananas, a potentially past-due carton of strawberries, and a pear, but she would take what she could get.

When at last her children arrived home, they were greeted by a table full of fruit and a hug.  The hug was typical, the fruit salad was not.  At least not in the last few months.  Rosa had been hugging her children since their births but in the last seven and a half months, she had started clinging to them when they came home.  She feared that they would be torn from her as well, and she would be just as helpless to stop it.  The food, however, was uncommon.  Rosa McClain was not known for her cooking.  She never had been.  But after Lance went missing, the extent of her involvement in meals was limited to providing the raw ingredients and a cookbook.

It was time to do better than that.

They all sat down together, even if it was just a snack.  Hector seemed to know what she was doing, but the others remained puzzled.  Bella was still silent.

"I'm sorry," she began.

"For what?" asked Manny, bless his soul.

"For being neglectful.  I'm going to try to do better now.  I'm going to make sure that I make dinner every night now, and I'll try to make breakfast on Sundays.  If I don't do that, hold me to my promise, okay? Because I'm promising you right now, that I will make you all meals on a reliable basis.  I'm glad that you all know how to cook, but I should be doing more." She started tearing up and she clenched her fists in her lap.  She closed her eyes to try and hold the tears back, and in a flash, she felt four pairs of arms wrapped around her.  Rosa sobbed, but she realized a few seconds in that it was out of joy, not sadness.

"It's okay Mama," murmured Bella, and Rosa wanted to scream in elation.  She was talking again! Even if she was quiet, she was talking! But she was dragged rudely down to Earth as Bella continued. "It's been hard on all of us."

"Yes, but I should have been doing more..." She buried her face in Hector's shoulder and squeezed her children tighter.

"We know that you're trying.  We're all struggling with it.  We all want Lance back," Hector said. "You're doing wonderfully.  Thank you."

Slowly the five of them broke apart and ate in comfortable silence.

After they all cleaned up their plates, Rosa sent them off to their rooms to do their homework.  It was a good thing that they had school-issue computers, even if they were outdated and only functioned with unreasonable difficulty.

She then set off to her own room to do the homework that she had assigned herself.

Mrs. Holt's website was in a very unprofessional format but her information was deep and revealing.  She cited her sources when she wrote an article, she had created an FAQ, and she had a whole page of ways to get in touch with her or to find more information.  Although her theories ranged from far beyond the realm of reason to well within it, they were all well substantiated.  Rosa could only surmise that the unimpressive formatting and Comic Sans font were to keep it from being taken seriously on a cursory glance.

Rosa copied down the email address to her contact book and closed her tabs.  She chose to spend the rest of her evening looking up recipes to prepare in the future and doing her best to scrape together a fully fledged meal.

Her family, minus Thomas, ate together in front of the television, even though it wasn't Friday.  Their smiles were tentative and the cheer that filled the room seemed perhaps a little unstable, but it was a better night than they had had in weeks.  Manny fell asleep to Star Trek, and after that it was all downhill.  Yawns occurred every few seconds and there was really nothing for it.  Rosa shepherded her kids upstairs and got herself ready for bed as well.

Thomas got home around ten o'clock and they exchanged brief greetings before falling sound asleep.


	2. Questions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Morality, legality, and a regular sleep schedule all come into question.

After the Star Trek night, the McClain family fell into a kind of routine.  Rosa would send Hector and Sara off to high school and walk with Bella and Manny to the elementary school a few blocks away.  Then she'd settle on a meal for the evening, get all the ingredients and set any processes into motion that needed more than an hour before she went off to work.  She'd look for more about the Garrison's cover-ups, find ways to make phone calls or send emails undetected, and learn how to pirate movies until her shift was over.

The routine worked out, but only because it helped distract from their grief.  The food was decent but nothing to write home about; bad things still happened at school but at least Manny no longer cried everyday.  The small things were what made it really bearable, not the schedule that they adhered to desperately.

When Bella got three straight A's in her math class, Rosa got her some hot chocolate at the cafe by the library.

When Manny got into the elementary school play of A Midsummer Night's Dream as Puck, Rosa made sure he got flowers at the opening night.

When Sara made honor roll after she was allowed back at school, Rosa crocheted her a laptop case.

And when Hector made it into his first place college on a scholarship, Rosa took him out for dinner at his favorite restaurant.

Nothing was all that expensive by virtue that the McClains simply couldn't afford it to be, but as long as things were better than they had been, Rosa considered it worth it.

"Mama," came Manny's voice in the middle of the night, when Tom was working overtime and it was long after his bedtime, "why won't the Garrison tell us where Lance is? I miss him."

"Manny, they probably don't know.  Go back to bed, honey." Rosa ushered him back upstairs, but he slipped under her arm and sat on the arm of their couch.

"No, I want to know why the Garrison won't tell us anything about Lance.  Aren't they s'posed to be the good guys?" Rosa sighed and sat down next to her son, pulling him into her lap.

"Yes, honey, they are supposed to be the good guys.  We'd all like to think so.  But the world isn't like that, you don't just have good guys and bad guys.  Everyone's very complicated, and most people don't fit into the roles of good or bad."

"Like muggles!" Manny interjected with an expression of pure understanding on his face. "Muggles aren't good or bad, they just are."

"I didn't know you'd started reading Harry Potter yet. What book are you on?" He wasn't supposed to be reading those yet, didn't he  _know_ that?

"Sara's reading it to me! We're on Chamber of Secrets." He smiled and Rosa knew she couldn't tell him to stop now.  If he was happy, who was she to take that away from him? He meant everything to her. "But if the Garrison is supposed to be the good guys, why aren't they acting like it?"

"Manny, sweetie, just because they're supposed to doesn't mean they are.  The Garrison is part of our government.  They have their own agenda, their own plans, and frankly they aren't very honest people.  Maybe when all the people who work for the Garrison are away from each other they're different, or maybe they aren't, but when they're at work they're under pressure and they do things they might not do normally." 

"So are they bad people?"

"No, no, honey.  They aren't bad people.  Sweetie, no one is _just_ bad or _just_ good.  People are always a mix of good and bad, and everyone has things they want to do, and sometimes these things direct their whole lives.  The Garrison isn't good or bad." She stood and picked him up as she went. "Oof! Manny, you're getting heavy."

"No, I'm not," he yawned.

"Well, it's off to bed for you."

"I'm not...," he trailed off. "I'm not tired." No matter what he said, he fell asleep on her shoulder as she carried him upstairs.

"Sure kiddo.  Keep telling yourself that."

Rosa tucked her son into his bed and walked back downstairs to the memorial to Lance.  She picked up the framed photo of her precious boy running by her.  She sunk into a dining room chair and tried to hold back her tears until she realized that there was no one around to hide them from.  They felt like huge globs of liquid swarming down her face to her chin.  They weren't, they couldn't, that wasn't how water worked...  But how liquid actually functioned didn't matter in the darkness of quiet house.  The scarce blue light struggled through the blinds on the windows and cast eerie shadows through the dining room.  Rosa's tears only distorted the shadows further.

Her sobs overwhelmed her ears and she felt herself drifting.  She tried to recall Lance's voice; how he laughed, how he told jokes, the tone he took when talking to the village idiot.  There were snippets of everything, but nothing concrete.  It was like someone had torn up her memories and they were floating away on a breeze, just too fast for her to catch up to them.

What had her boy said to her before he left for the Garrison? She couldn't remember.  What was the name of his roommate? She didn't know.

She knew his favorite color (blue), that he was desperate to be valued and at the same time hopelessly confident, what stuffed animal he kept with him when he slept (Red, a lion they had got at the local zoo), and that he picked up what he had thought was a glass of water at a party they'd been socially obligated to attend and had gotten vodka instead.

Rosa knew these things like she knew his name, which was to say she knew it better than her own, but for the life of her his voice escaped her.

"Hey." her husband's soft voice rescued her from her thoughts and he rubbed her shoulders. "Sorry I'm home so late."

"Hey, sweetheart." She rested her hand on his and leaned into him. "It's fine.  The kids are all asleep, or should be."

"Yeah, I figured.  Why aren't you? I told you that you need more sleep.  You've been tossing and turning since...," He swallowed, and Rosa only barely heard it. "Since Lance disappeared.  I thought you'd been feeling better.  Is everything okay?"

Rosa nodded and smiled tiredly. "Yeah, I'm fine.  Just had some emotional labor with Manny earlier."

Tom sat down in the chair to her right, glanced at the photo of Lance lying on the table, and propped it back up.

"What happened? Tantrum?"

"Worse." She sighed. "He wanted to know why the Garrison wouldn't tell us where Lance is."

Tom dragged his hand down his face. "Oh dear.  What did you say?"

"I told him that they were probably just as ignorant as we are.  But then he started asking questions about morality and whether or not the Garrison were the 'good guys,' and I just.  I told him it wasn't that simple, but what do you say to that? He's eight! The government already has such a grip on his view of the world, of morality.  He's too young to have this happen to him; he's too young!"

"I don't know what to say.  Yes, he's young, and I wish that this hadn't happened to us, to him, but it did.  We can't deal our own cards, we have to work with the hand we have." Tom reached for Rosa's hand and she clasped his in her own. "But Rosa, it's been almost nine months.  Lance isn't coming back.  We still haven't put an obituary in the Times, and I think it's really time that we admitted that," he paused to take a deep breath, "I think it's time we admitted that Lance is dead.  We should call your sister, our neices and nephews, and explain.  I know that you've had difficulty reaching out recently.  We should reconnect and invite them to a funeral."

Rosa stood and pulled her hand gently away from Tom's.

"In the morning, yeah?"

Tom smiled.

"Yeah, in the morning."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit shorter than I wanted it to be, but I got it done! An update! I don't have as much freetime as I'd like because I'm taking a class, but I'll try to update more frequently.
> 
> Anyways, if you think this is kudos/comment-worthy, hit me up! Seeing them makes me so happy, and everyone who reads my stuff is part of my motivation.

**Author's Note:**

> And that's a wrap!
> 
> Leave some kudos and maybe a comment or two if you liked it! My writing machine is running on empty.


End file.
